NAVIER-STOKES COMPUTER.

Problems in fluid mechanics involving complex flow simulations require far more speed and capacity than that provided by current and proposed Class VI supercomputers. To address this concern, the Navier-Stokes Computer (NSC) was developed. The NSC is a parallel-processing machine, comprised of individual Nodes, each comparable in performance to current supercomputers. The global architecture is that of a hypercube, and a 128-Node NSC has been designed. The performance of the NSC scales almost linearly with the number of Nodes. New architectural features, such as a reconfigurable many-function ALU pipeline and a multifunction memory-ALU switch, have provided the capability to efficiently implement a wide range of algorithms. To illustrate the architecture, programming, and several of the capabilities of the NSC, the simulation of two-dimensional nonsteady viscous flows on a prototype Node, called the miniNode, is presented.